Posted
by
ScuttleMonkeyon Saturday March 01, 2008 @10:30PM
from the amicus-populorum dept.

Linux.com is reporting that the End Software Patents project is launching several new initiatives to help drive support for their cause. Among the new methods are a web site, a report on the state of patents in the US, and a scholarship contest promising to award $10,000 "for the best paper on the effects of the patentability of software and business methods under US law." "The project is being launched with initial funding of a quarter million dollars, supplied primarily by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). Under the directorship of Ben Klemens, a long-time advocate of software patent abolition best-known for the book Math You Can't Use: Patents, Copyright, and Software, the project is being supported by the FSF, the Public Patent Foundation, and the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC). One of ESP's goals is to enlist support from academics, software developers, legal experts, and business executives. Its initial supporters show that the project is already well on its way to building such a coalition."

Whatever you think about RMS and FSF you have to agree that getting rid of software patents would benefit everyone, globally in the software industry. From the commercial hardware vendors, all the way down to the hobbyist BSD developer.

I can't wait for it to happen in the states as I predict it will also trigger the fall in the few countries that also allow software patents.

From a Linux desktop standpoint alone it would finally allow for built in support of DVD, MP3s, etc. Some projects such as GIMP won't have to work around patents to get the features they want built in. Open source driver support might increase..

Even from a closed source perspective Microsoft wouldn't have to worry about getting sued and having to purchase massive amounts of patents to defend itself. They could focus of providing a better user experience without restrictions that patents encumber you with.

I agree with you. And those that say "software patents help the industry" are totally wrong. If it weren't for SW patents we would have less of a monopoly and stagnation of software because every one would be on equal footing and the community projects (Linux) could use the same things as the commercial projects (Mac and Windows) legally.

Yes, long copyright and patent terms slow down progress. A reasonable term nowadays is 7 years.With long copyright terms you don't have to compete against your old stuff - you can make stuff like Vista or Office 2007;).

With long patent terms, even if you can't implement something (because you suck) you can prevent other people from making progress or slow them down.

Long copyrights are for people who can only come up with one good song in their lifetime, or the companies that enslave them.Long patents are f

and the community projects (Linux) could use the same things as the commercial projects (Mac and Windows) legally

They would sue for copyrigh infringement and corporate secrecy and such, which will lead us to back-engineer e.g. Word. Oh, wait, that is what we do now anyway.Even though the code is not under patents, does not mean it is suddenly available for all to download.

I still think it would be a good thing. However even more openness would be required to have real competition. Espeicialy the abilty to i

We could have MP3 playback, but not DVD playback. DVD playback of protected DVDs (in the US at least) requires breaking of the DMCA. Abolishing patents would not solve this. Granted, there are legal ways to play back DVDs on Linux [mandriva.com], but most people who use Linux don't want to pay to pay the licensing fee. You have to pay the licensing fee on Windows, or on any other implementation. So I don't see the reason you shouldn't have to pay for it on Linux.

There are two more winners. A lot of companies do cross licensing agreements of patents so company A can use company B's stuff and there is no worry about infringement.

What this does is that any company not in the patent cross licensing network gets forced out of business, and any innovations they do have on a work that is claimed to be patented end up being able to be used by the holder.

Last, there are companies out there who buy obscure patents looking for something that related so a company's mainstay. The small company then sues the large company. Almost always, this is settled secretly for lots of money before it goes to court. Even if the patent is questionable, the larger company is on the defensive because if for some reason it does get upheld in a court, its the end of their business.

I used to have faith in the patent system, where people who were infringing were doing so deliberately, similar to people who made counterfeit software boxes. Now, the barrier for tripping over some obscure patent is so low, almost any company is at risk.

"Even if the patent is questionable, the larger company is on the defensive because if for some reason it does get upheld in a court, its the end of their business."Actually it's more ridiculous than that.

If the smaller company actually makes stuff, the larger company might have more patents that it can use to threaten the smaller company with. Defensive. Think IBM vs small corps.

But if the smaller company doesn't actually make stuff at all, then yes they can do that.

Whatever you think about RMS and FSF you have to agree that getting rid of software patents would benefit everyone, globally in the software industry.

I'm not 100% convinced this is true. On the surface it seems good, but I'm sure there's secondary fallout that's not being considered. Analogous (but obviously not exactly like) to the: if you can't patent drugs, sick people can get more drugs... but now the incentive and funding to research drugs has dropped dramatically, so there's a cost for that to ever

What does this tell us? Most of Europe doesn't allow software patents, and the U.S. didn't prior to 1981, so clearly patents were not a necessary incentive for companies to innovate in the software space. Q.E.D.

Further, software is the only field that is protected by both patents and copyright. That's simply unreasonable, and there is no good reason for this to be the case. Drop one. We need to tell the corporate software world that if you don't mind giving up copyright protection, you can keep your patents. I dare say not a single company will choose that route, as copyright is a far more valuable tool for corporate software manufacturers.

What does this tell us? Most of Europe doesn't allow software patents, and the U.S. didn't prior to 1981, so clearly patents were not a necessary incentive for companies to innovate in the software space. Q.E.D.

The problem with that proof is that it doesn't demonstrate that an equal amount of software innovation took place with software patents in play vs. without.

I mean, if we get rid of drug patents, AIDS research isn't going to go away, but there's sure going to be a lot less of it. Is that the case wit

I mean, if we get rid of drug patents, AIDS research isn't going to go away, but there's sure going to be a lot less of it.

Can you be sure of that? Most basic medical research is financed with government funds. Pharmaceutical companies generally finance only the last step of the research. That is, they do the testing necessary to bring a promising drug to market. Certainly if pharmaceuticals didn't handle the last step other sources would open up--likely more government funding. If that were the case it seems likely to me many more drugs would be studied including many that pharmaceuticals wouldn't bother with.

One also needs to factor in roadblocks to research when scientists hide their work until they can file for a patent. And consider the extra costs researchers encounter when they have to pay royalties on patented research techniques and patented source materials.

Well, look at it this way. We had lots of research going on in computer software, and then patents happened in the 80s, and since then, the research spending has basically dried up and real innovation (as opposed to mere incremental improvement) has dramatically slowed. Granted, we don't have a control group, so we can't definitively say that the slowdown was caused by patents, but we have seen enough examples of innovation being hampered by patents and enough research driven predominantly by the desire to get more patents instead of being driven by a desire to improve the state of the art that we can pretty clearly conclude that patents have a deleterious effect. The only thing that isn't clear is the extent to which this is the case, IMHO.

In fact, I'd go so far as to say that all of the major innovations in the field of computer software were created prior to the U.S. allowing patents, including:

Time sharing/process scheduling (late 1950s)

Symmetric multiprocessing (mid 1960s)

UNIX (late 1960s)

TCP/IP (early 1970s)

Paged memory management (early 1970s)

Non-linear video editing (early 1970s)

Ethernet (mid 1970s)

Modern graphical user interfaces (late 1970s)

Mice (late 1970s)

When you get right down to it, my computer still basically works the same way as System 1.0 Mac, just with color graphics, a lot more general UI polish, and a lot more features. The basic overall feel, however, is still pretty much the same, only faster. Under the hood, most operating systems still work basically the same way as UNIX did in the 1970s. Computer hardware has gotten much faster and smaller, which has allowed lots of things to be possible that weren't feasible at the time, but even most of the things we think of as "new" like digital video editing date all the way back to the early 1970s, albeit on specialized computer hardware that would fill your entire garage. The only giant leaps since the 80s have been in hardware designs. and, to a limited degree, in the software necessary to support advancement in the hardware.

Where, then, are the huge leaps that software patent proponents promised? Why did those leaps basically dry up as software patents became entrenched in the U.S.? Outside of a few specialized areas like computer graphics and voice recognition, the computer industry basically has been stagnant since software patents became legal. Worse, most of the "revolutionary" ideas since then have either been evolutionary dead ends like NUMA and ccNUMA or have taken absurdly long to catch on like touch screens, which first appeared commercially in the early 80s, but outside of POS systems and PDAs/smartphones, are still almost nonexistent in the marketplace.

If you need proof that patents don't inherently result in increased innovation (at least in computers), the proof of the pudding is in the eating. Would the innovation slowdown have occurred in the same way if we didn't have patents? Maybe, but I can tell you that there is a lot less pure research being done in major tech companies now than at any time in the past couple of decades. If patents are supposed to encourage research spending, they are sure doing a lousy job of it.

Mice = 1970s? Earlier than that, and far far more than just mice too:http://sloan.stanford.edu/mousesite/1968Demo.html

That's when they demonstrated the stuff they had been working on for _years_.

Now progress is just "wow what a great GUI theme". Yes I'm looking at the Linux Desktop bunch too - a lot of what they make are basically cutscenes that get in the way of doing stuff- very nice cutscenes I suppose, but lets have better "gameplay" already. Wobbling, translucent windows, fancy animations are all crap

Have any of those "inventions" been patented though? A lot of those systems are much older than software patents also. RDBMS [wikipedia.org] was first proposed in 1970. Although object oriented programming [wikipedia.org] wasn't really used mucn until the 90's, the ideas for it originated in the 60's.

As I read this I just had a thought. Whether I agree or not is irrelevant but I can see how it would be hard to enforce 'patent or copyright: pick one and only one to protect you'. Software is complex, composed of many instructions and expressions. Much of which may not be patented or patentable. But some very key portions might be patented or patentable. While the entire work may be copyrighted only small portions may be patented. Maybe the design is patented. How can the work be quantified into wha

1. The use of a visual logo as a trademark has been possible for a lot longer, I think.
2. Trademark protection requires continuous fees or it goes away.
3. Trademark protection only protects against a very limited range of uses.
4. Trademarks only protect how something looks, which is relatively unimportant compared to how something works.

Basically, trademark protection is a lot like design patents in software. I'm okay with letting those continue to exist, though perhaps the duration of design pate

Everyone wants to abolish software patents, so they can use the research that went into them without paying, but NOBODY wants to propose ANY alternatives for financial compensation to those who develop such technology. I guess it's going to be up to the magical fairies to develop MPEG-5, 802.11z, et al. for us.

What utter drivel. Copyright (which lasts far longer than patents) are the domain of software. Why is it that software of all "innovations" (God I hate that term) is the only one privileged enough to

Sounds good. At first sight.Actually, are you a communist or what? Why do you defend governmental interventionism ('patent') to guarantee everyone repayment on their investment? Oh, more of a capitalist, then?I have actually just today spent some 18 Dollars to create a new flavour of cheese cake. Now you can help me, which department is the one to contact for readily ROI? And I am entitled to some repayment, and surely to protection from anyone else baking the same type of cake, right? You are happy paying

The software patent lobby is huge even if they are underreported on. Just think about Amazon and how they defend obvious software patents. There are so many patent holders out there right now that have so much to worry about that despite this new organized effort to reform I fear it will not totally solve the problem. There would be "grandfather" software patent clauses or something I would bet...

Yeah, this is what bothered me so much about the $10,000 scholarship contest. If you want to get something done give that $10K to a Senator, not some poor student! Bribing politicians is a time tested way of getting what you want. That's how we got the software patents in the first place!

Take the ten thousand dollars, multiply it by ten thousand, and use that to fly congressmen and women and senators to luxury resorts; buy the kids and grandkids of same tuition to ivy league universities; get them jobs on the boards of major corporations that pay big money with little or no responsibility... etc. etc. etc. If that doesn't work use the remaining money to find the weaknesses of same and exploit them. Just like the people who are paid to advocate software patents to legislators. Then you will get rid of the software patents. You have to fight fire with fire.

Nice polite little information campaigns and essay contests talking about giving it to the 'man' won't do squat. The only people who will listen to those are the people who already agree with you.

This prohibits far more than software patents - some types of medical treatments, manufacturing processes, and so on. That might be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

This confirms what I already suspected - it is brutally difficult to define a software patent. It's one of those problems that seems easy at the onset, but gets more and more complicated the more you think it through.

This prohibits far more than software patents - some types of medical treatments, manufacturing processes, and so on. That might be a good or bad thing, depending on how you look at it.

How would that be a bad thing? It would mean, A) Cheaper medicine (because you can buy the generic ones rather then the patented name-brand ones) B) Cheaper goods (because they could use more effecent manufacturing methods) and of course C) We might (actually) innovate past 2000 in software. I really don't see how that can be a bad thing.

I remember previous discussions here on this topic mentioning that a lot of drug development funding currently comes from the government. Assuming the private research disappeared completely, there would still be pharmaceutical research, albeit less.

> who the hell wants to spend their life researching or fund researching it if there is not money in it?

Who the hell wants to spend their life on developing free open source software? That's right, lots of people. Some people actually can and will care more about the human kind than themselves. And some people might even want to find a cure for someone they know.

Optimal solution would be that all countries would give money into same pool, where money would then be shared for research projects that would

Perhaps we should go back to the old method of patenting stuff that was done in the early days of the patent office. Every patent application needs a working prototype to be sent in with it. This case, if someone patents warp drive, the USPTO better be getting a flux capacitor via UPS.

Of course, this has its issues, a manufacturing process would be hard to send a prototype of, other than perhaps the before, during, and after stage.

What does this have to do with software patents, though? The problem isn't so much that ideas are patented (since one could send in source code of a program using the idea) but the insane crap that gets patented. Theoretically no patents are supposed to be awarded for obvious extensions of previous patents, but it seems more and more software patents are being awarded for things that are simply a different way of looking at things.

First you tell that it should be send in. Next you tell that it isn't possible with certain things. Now I could send you the printout of my idea that turns zeroes and ones into a program. I send in my 'hello world' and I have just been grated patents to program compiling.

It will stop ideas in general (which is good) but it won't stop programs from being patented.

This confirms what I already suspected - it is brutally difficult to define a software patent.

Luckily, that's an implementation detail that can be sidestepped in a number of ways. For example, we could allow patenting things mostly as is done now, but make patents unenforceable against software by adopting the following rule: If something would not be infringing if its software were removed, then it is not infringing.

How do you know? How do you know what math has already been developed, but will never get published or even mentioned due to NDA's? On what are you basing the assumption that it is not useful? Anyway, I'll assume that you haven't read the link which in the gggp which the guy trashed in ggp. I've made my arguments there. I am not gonna do point counter point when it's all there already.

I'm sure they are in violation of my patent on Method and Apparatus for Advocating Political Viewpoints using a distributed computer network, whereby arguments for said Political Advocacy are stored on a server, and are accessible to interested clients via a web browser using a standard web browsing internet protocol.

We live in the only period of history where it is possible to get a patent on something you discovered without claiming you invented it. If I found a piece of farming equipment that did some novel thing and I went and applied for a patent on it, I would be asked to declare that I invented it and it is not the work of someone else - to satisfy the no-prior-art test. If, however, I am pulling apart a bacterium or some other living creature, the patent office will happily grand me a patent on its genes - they won't even ask me if I invented these genes because it is assumed that I am just patenting a discovery.

I think it would be a far simpler solution if patent examiners just enforced the rules already in place, that is you aren't allowed to patent ideas. Then you wouldn't be able to patent "A program that translates text from one language to another" but instead would be able to patent the code that does do that. Obviously you would have to release your code so other people can learn from and build upon it, which is why you get protection. Isn't that the whole point of the patent system? If you expose your trade secrets we grant you a limited time for a monopoly on it.

Dear All,
It is with amazement that I read of the polarized debate going on in the US.
The present US software patenting system is broken and the proposal to abolish software patenting would throw the baby out with the bathwater.
The whole of Europe uses a unified system that permits such patents but forces them to jump through rigorous test to cut the crap that is patented in the US and that clogs up the US patenting system and cause endless costs and angst in the software community.
In Europe software

The European patent office grants patents for software illegally, after years of wriggling and twisting by one (Dutch) member of the Board of Appeal, who stepwise expanded the scope of what was deemed patentable. The current chaos in the different European countries on how this should be dealt with is in no small part due to this, as the grant clearly goes much further than the law (your reference was written by a patent attorney of Philips who did an excellent job of presenting a biased story). Even the Br

"The whole of Europe uses a unified system that permits such patents but forces them to jump through rigorous test to cut the crap that is patented in the US and that clogs up the US patenting system and cause endless costs and angst in the software community... See for a brilliant simple description : http://www.iusmentis.com/patents/software/epc/ [iusmentis.com]"

Unfortunately the Ius mentis description is dated and misleading anyway:

Regardless of the scope of software patents they are essentially useless and only harms the progress.

If A creates a piece of software and patents it it also means that B can't do it too even if the implementation is completely different and may be more effective unless B also pays A for something that he never will or want to use just because the end result is the same.

The only persons that benefit from the patents are really the patent lawyers. A will waste a lot of time trying to defend patents and B

Some folks don't like me using the IPR acronym, because they define it as a subversive act to undermine the sharing of knowledge.FMP - IPR should only be owned by the individual (prevent buying and selling) who created it, and allow lease (agreements/contracts) to institutions (schools, businesses, governments, religions...). Institutions have no intellect (reality) and have no reasonable claim to intellectual property created by an individual, group, community. Protect the freedoms of the artists, intelle

Honestly, this call for papers and award is along the lines of asking for more on top of what we already have, proof that going against nature will bring you harm.i.e. step off the empire state building...you will fall and die. Drive a car into a solid wall @ 500 mph, you will die.

Make software patentable and you will suffer the consequence of contradicting nature just the same.

People are born everyday with a blank slate of knowledge, but do all these new people do things that kill themselves, so to find out it will kill them? NO!

So how much do we need to harm ourselves with software patents before those making it possible to patent software and contradict nature, learn?

see:Abstraction Physics [abstractionphysics.net] as the subject matter is fundamentally NOT about politics or economics, as organized crime has both a good economy and politics, but it doesn't make it honest and genuinely in touch with physical reality such that you can drive a car into a wall @ 500mph and live.

This software patent matter is really getting to be stupid on stupid. Software classification is not a human choice, but a human mental characteristic, and even stupid proves it.

Has anyone shown proof that driving a car into a wall @ 500mph will kill you, to those allowing software patents?If not, then why are they not finding out for themselves?If so then someone should point out that they should try 499mph to find out if it makes a difference. (re: all the abstract possibilities of proof for or against software patents)....use this as an analogy to those wanting proof of software patent damage (uh, err maybe it won't be damaging this way.....)

Its really amazing how much money is being spent on such distorted efforts rather than producing the proof that software is not of patentable qualities.

No, the basic arguments aren't just that but they are so general its hard not to avoid them. Think about a patent of a method of making a vacuum cleaner, its a new idea it should be patented, thats fine, but how about a "machine that uses suction to clean" as a patent with little evidence that you even have one made, the second one represents most software patents of say "a method to download songs onto a hard disk to be played back at a later date" where there are very few "true" software patents that aren't held by patent trolls or monopolies.

In short, I can get a patent for making a vacuum cleaner (minus prior art and such) but most software patents try to patent "a cleaning device using suction" and many of them decide to then go for "a *insert adjective* device using suction" and "a cleaning device using *insert word here*". And that is what makes software patents different.

I was struck with how many of the good ideas in programming languages were discovered early on. The decade 1964-1974 seems to have been a "Golden Age": most of the good ideas of programming languages appeared then.

http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2059 [lambda-the-ultimate.org]
Maybe we could start with the birth of, say, Unix and pick our way forward in time, cataloging the various ideas, a la Aristotle. I think a graph of the count of genuinely new discoveries per year would drop off at a brisk pace.
But I don't think the USPTO can handle that sort of truth. Truth has deleterious effects on business models, you know.

I don't think it has to do with abstracts of truth and business models as much as it does a severely overloaded and inexperienced system that relies heavily on the applicant to find and odder prior art. Combine that with an vague and somewhat ambiguous court ruling that allowed software patents in the first place, and you can see the abuse isn't necessarily malice on the USPTO.

We have to remember, it was a court ruling that added software patents to the system, not a well constructed law laying out definitions and boundaries. Our fearless (US) leaders decided it would be better to just create a court for disputes instead of defining some things that seriously seem to be out of whack. The result is the often trolled and abused system we take for granted today.

The so called "good guys" spent too much time fighting the process in an attempt to get some sanity to the ordeal. Now it seems that they have to play catch up and suffer the role of quarterback and getting sacked in the game that shouldn't need to be played while they build up their defensive line. And seeing how no analogy would be complete without a referece to a car, they drove a red car to the game.

IMHO, what this guy has to say about programming languages is about as valid as my dad saying that no good music has been made since the 1960's.

He's trapped in the past. I'm sure there'd be an argument for why programming innovations of the last 10 years aren't really interesting or aren't as important as his Golden Age, just as there are people who think you can mathematically prove that rock was perfected in 1968. At best, you can make it work with a very narrow definition of what qualifies, just as you can prove that modern music has little innovation if you decide that only Gregorian Chant really qualifies as music.

Meanwhile, the world moves on and a generation of programming pioneers trades their vision for early admission to Future Fossil Fuels university.

``Meanwhile, the world moves on and a generation of programming pioneers trades their vision for early admission to Future Fossil Fuels university.''More like, new people make it big in life using the same ideas that somebody else already came up with.

See Java with a bunch of good, old ideas thrown together to make a mediocre language. It caught on majorly and many people think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread.

See Skype, a proprietary voice (and now video) chat system. It's been done before and us

So instead of fixing the problem, we should all throw out the baby with the bathwater, eliminating patents all together, and condemning the many companies who have legitimate reasons and needs for patents.

So instead of fixing the problem, we should all throw out the baby with the bathwater, eliminating patents all together, and condemning the many companies who have legitimate reasons and needs for patents.

The baby is a baby cobra, so yes, we should throw it out.

Having no software patents at all would still be a massive improvement over what we currently have. And we don't know how to build a better system.

The production of tangible objects is more open to variation, since you have a huge spectrum of techniques at your disposal. You can truly "think outside the box" to tools that others may have not even considered yet, and create true innovation. Not only that, but others can easily find other ways to do the same thing in a completely different way, and the two ideas can compete.Software is built from limited sets of CPU instructions. For 99% of the tasks that a computer has to do, there is one most efficien

Since software is just "pushing buttons" to make new code, there is nothing new...

No, that's not the argument.

The argument used to justify any patents is that they promote progress. Our experience with patents in the specific case of software is that they actually hinder progress. Therefore, in order to promote progress, software patents should be abolished.

Our experience with patents in the specific case of software is that they actually hinder progress.

That's one hell of a burden of proof to put on yourself. I don't believe you can POSSIBLY prove that to be the case in any objective way, so the only thing you can argue is a few anecdotes, and what your personal opinion happens to be... Not at all a convincing case.

4.114 There have been calls in the UK to introduce pure computer software patents toensure that innovation is properly protected and encouraged. In Europe, patents are notgranted for computer programs as such,87 but patents have been granted to computer-basedinnovations provided they have a technical effect. In the USA, pure computer softwarepatents can be granted. The evidence on the success of pure computer software patents ismixed. The software industry in the USA grew exponentially without pure software patents,suggesting they are not necessary to promote innovation.88 The evidence suggests softwarepatents are used strategically; that is, to prevent competitors from developing in a similarfield, rather than to incentivise innovation.

4.116 Introducing pure software patents could raise the costs for small software developersto mitigate against risks surrounding R&D, thereby inflating the capital needs of softwaredevelopment. Sun Microsystems argued that without exceptions that allowed for reverseengineering for interoperability, pure software patents could stifle competition.

4.117 Last year, the European Parliament rejected the Computer Implemented InventionsDirective, but this issue has been raised again. The economic evidence suggests that suchpatents have done little to raise incentives to innovate, and other evidence suggests that theintroduction of such patents will have a chilling effect on innovation. In the absence of suchevidence, a new right for pure software patents should not be introduced, and so the scope ofpatentability should not be extended to cover computer programs as such.

4.122 The Review supports the current position on pure software patents, business methodpatents and gene patents, and recommends that changes to the current position should onlybe made in light of economic evidence that such changes would enhance innovation to offsetthe considerable costs.

Recommendation 17: Maintain policy of not extending patent rights beyond their present limits within the areas of software, business methods and genes.

There's a 3D shader technique called Phong shading [wikimedia.org]. If Phong shading was patented then Blinn-Phong [wikimedia.org] would never have be discovered which is a change in math. Blinn-Phong is faster and provides more accurate results.

All software is a form of math, one technique can have completely different looking math but produces the same results such as the prior example. You can not patent math because you didn't invent anything, you just discovered the formula which was already there.

Well that is not really the idea.. Patents are supposed to protect implementations. A mathematical principle or natural law is something that a person implements. Like today I am going to implement F=ma. Not really unless you have a lot more abilities than a normal person.

Of course you can implement a computur program that implements the RSA algorithm... that is a little different.

I've seen very few (if any) software patents that actually included an implementation. Not only that, but how far do you have to deviate from the given implementation or order to get around the patent, or make something else that can be repatented? There's probably hundreds of ways to write a merge sort [wikipedia.org], that in the end, produce the same result, with about the same efficency (as far as Big-O notation is concerned). You can rearrange certain steps, or just change some trivial things and still end up wit

basically the reason why there is a difference is that, software isn't entirely developed by 'for profit' entities. Consider linux, linus torvalds has never made a dime for all the hours he's put into the linux kernel. instead here today he can go around and see all kinds of people like kde, gnome, firefox, debian, ubuntu, etc making open source linux software simply because nobody has to pay anyone for the use of this software.software patents AT the very least, should NOT APPLY TO OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS.

software patents AT the very least, should NOT APPLY TO OPEN SOURCE PROJECTS

Here's a problem though. If I release some code under a BSD license, it's open source. If Sun distribute it with Solaris, it's still open source. If someone downloads it from Sun and puts it in an embedded box burnt into ROM, is it still open source? Does it make a difference if they modify it? Or if you can still get the original code from me? What about if I use the code internally to make millions (e.g. Pixar using a rendering algorithm)?

I don't see how getting rid of software patents would keep that from happening. Last time I checked most for profit software companies don't release the source code. Even then it would still be a non-trivial task to understand it. I don't believe the End Software Patents Project goals are to make all software free, it's just to get rid of things like Amazon's One-Click Patent. Companies would still have trademarks, copyrights, and the other multitude of protections.

Without buying both a bottle of NyQuill and its knock-off, I can't honestly compare the two (i.e. apples to apples). Name recoginition is extremely important, it is one's brand. Which makes it an investment; and one only invests in something they intend on gaining a return on. True, there are some people who truly beileve that we should all share, but let us be honest. Nothing in life is fair. I don't feel sorry when someone does not have the same benefits as I, nor do I feel sorry for myself if I see

Ideas are worth something, but software patents have NOTHING to do with the value of your code. They keep you from coding things. If you devise some technically superior method of finding the digits of PI, patenting software that performs this function doesn't deserve a patent. The idea alone, outside of the software is the value... not the meaningless language representation in a handful of files. And no one is even saying to give your code away. Keep it to yourself if you want to. It too has nothing to do

The two are not inseparatanle concepts. If my method of "finding the digits of PI" is superior than the current standard or someone else's idea and I want to make money off of that, why should I not be allowed to do so? I can't do that, if EVERYBODY has the code which enables that function. But I can if I patent it and demand payment to use my code. This is no different from a physical invention, save that it is easier to mass produce.

Nobody SAID give away your code. In my example, you would patent the math of finding the PI digits, not the software that does it. Do you see the difference? I think you are confusing copyright and patents anyway. Like I said, don't GIVE AWAY your code if you don't want to. It has copyright, just like anything else ever written. Patent the science behind it, copyright the implementation.

As the USPTO defines a patent: "A patent [is] for an invention is the grant of a property right to the inventor." In otherwords, if I invent a method and create software to execute said name invention (meaning I created the code as well) why should I not be able to patent it?

I respect your argument, but looking at the university, you are paying for the knowledge and ideas (packaged in a form the student will understand). Granted, anyone who is willing to do the legwork, could eventually learn on their own. Would you have paid to go to undergraduate, graduate and take the bar exam, if you did know that at the end you were going to reap rewards of being able to bill clients at (for purposes of this example, 2 - 500 dollars an hour)? Considering the opportunity cost(s) and all.

Patents only benefit _crappy_ inventors who can only come up with one or two good ideas in their lifetime or companies that enslave them (have you ever seen those contracts nowadays - your ideas, past, present and future become the property of the companies - and you thought slavery was abolished already).Real inventors know that ideas are a dime a dozen (heck I can think of tons of ways to make my company's (or other) stuff better, there just isn't enough time and resources to do them all). Building stuff

The reason for posting the above link it not to boast, as the code and the concept are very trivial, it is there just to show that I'm not against Open Source or Free Software, but just to make a point that Free as in beer is free for you but not for the one who serves it to you.

That's not true. Very frequently, the scenario operates like this:

Person A has a need for a piece of software to do X.

Person A creates a piece of software to do X.

Person A is now in possession of a piece of software to do X, and has gained from it - he is "paid" by having something to do X, which he did not have before. He created it purely because he needed it. But he's still got that software. He doesn't need to bury it in a hole. So he releases it for other people to use, and in no way does this cost him anything.

Person B has a need for a piece of software to do X and Y. He takes person A's software, and extends it to do Y as well.

The cycle continues. Each person involved benefits from the existence of the software that they need, which would not otherwise exist. Since they all would have had to create the software anyway (since they needed it and it didn't exist), it costs them nothing to let other people use it. And all of them are better off because they have shared the work, rather than each one duplicating it themselves: giving it away has actually gained them something, it hasn't cost them something.

Behind most successful free software projects is a cycle of individual need and gain like this one.